Collecting data is relatively easy, but turning raw information into something useful requires that you know how to extract precisely what you need. With this insightful book, intermediate to experienced programmers interested in data analysis will learn techniques for working with data in a business environment. You'll learn how to look at data to discover what it contains, how to capture those ideas in conceptual models, and then feed your understanding back into the organization through business plans, metrics dashboards, and other applications.

It's a little over 500 pages and thorough about describing how to analyze your data. However, it is light in the "with open source tools" part of the title. Most of the time is spent explaining concepts, and then each chapter ends with a workshop, which includes some code. There are examples throughout, but few provide an explanation of how a plot was made or the implementation of a method. So definitely not a book for beginners.

However, if you've taken an intro stat course, and are ready to learn more, then Data Analysis could be helpful. It's pretty technical, or as my wife said, "It has a lot of equations."

Win a copy

Want to win a copy? I have five of them up for grabs. For a chance to win, leave a comment below by January 9, 2011, 10:00pm PST. Tell us what you used to make your very first graph. Pencil and graph paper? Excel? R? Jelly beans?

Then come back here on Monday to see who won. I'll pick five people at random. Good luck and have a nice weekend.

Update: Congratulations to the following...

Chris - "The first graphs I made were with Generic Mapping Tools (which still really kicks ass). We made pub quality maps and graphs from Perl with GMT on the command line."

Ahh, well i guess the first graph with pen and pencil i guess.. really got hooked to data analysis before my undergrad (Mechatronics) when i used to collect plot and analyze data for me and my brothers performance in cricket matches.. good old days!

My first graph has probably been made with pencil and graph paper, learning statistic basics in highschool… When coming to “real” data analysis in college, my first graph has been made with Excel & XLStat macros when learning PCA. I have never used these tools ever since.

geography, probably something to do with rain fall or population, pump action pencil, graph paper, a straight edge (probably another work book), eraser – so heavy handed all mistakes were as clear as the intended graph.

In high school, we had a project on some I-can’t-remember-anymore type demographics. The graph was produced in Excel, copy-pasted into PowerPoint for modifications and the dumped into Word for “layout”. Thanks MS, I was traumatized for years…

When I was in school, there were no tools other than pencil and paper. Yes, we did have “graph paper”, and that’s what I did to draw a y=x^2 curve (and then impress my friends with my ability to quickly estimate the square root of any number less than 20).

First graph was graph paper and a mechanical pencil I’m sure (grade school). Moved on from there to hacking a ti-83 to make all kinds of graphical goodness. Now I’m a GIS nut, and use ESRI products along with GRASS to put together some pretty sweet maps/charts depending on what my project is on a given day.

I used a pencil and a piece of graph paper to make my first graph, however, one of my favorite graphs was an animated graph I created on my Commodore 64. My science teacher at the time commented that I put more time into programming the graph and accompanying presentation than I did the research and experiment. Hey, I was the only kid who had a fully automated presentation, who cares what the experiment was!

2H pencil, grid paper and ruler. I think it was in year 7 high school science class and I think (pushing the memory here) it was a line chart of temperature over time recorded as we boiled a beaker of water. I think it was also the first time we got to play with Bunsen Burners!

probably with pencil and paper. I onetime did one with origami sheets, but I belief that the result was a disaster. I now use Flash and Processing. You can find my last graph on http://marijerooze.nl/uva/NewMediaTheories.swf (it’s a prototype and it visualizes the articles we had to read for media theory)

I think I used standard graph paper to do the work and used my TI-83 to validate… Lame… It’s not as good as how my friend used to make graphs in Excel until I taught him about the graph button, haha… he used to color in the cells individually and updated the graph with any new data… I got a kick out of that…

If you can believe it, I recall doing a graph at a very early age when I went to computer camp and played with a turtle graphics language (LOGO?) on an early PC – a TRS-80, methinks, or a Commodore 64.

I made my first graph using old graph paper using pencils on paper my father brought home from work. He generated lots of graphs using a computer with his work and brought the old papers home to reuse. Great fun.

I made my very first graph with SAS during a stats tutorial, back in the day when graphical interfaces were merely dreams out of Star Trek Voyager. Which incidentally was on at the time. Best Star Trek ever. Take us to warp Mr Paris!

I think the first non-manual graphic I made was at Washington University in St. Louis in 1969: a set of parabolas showing trajectories at different angles, using a Spear Micro-Linc computer (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINC ). The program was written in LAP-6 assembly language. The machine was an early non-mainframe single-user $70,000 (1969 dollars) laboratory computer, the size of two large refrigerators, with 4K of core memory, an ASR-33 teletype with paper tape reader/punch, two cute little tape drives, and a storage oscilloscope for graphic display. It also had knobs connected to analog to digital converters for input, and digital to analog output, so that the machine could run laboratory equipment like the left-right in-out up-down controls of a microscope stage.

Graph paper and colored pencils. Thought that was done and finished long ago but refreshed to see my first-grader learning how to make graphs by hand now. Never better than to start with first principles before moving to the power tools.

for sure I did my first graph on pen and paper while studying Dijkstra’s algorighm at university, but then I discovered GraphViz, then Processing to do my graphs more dynamic, now I’m investigating large-scale data analysis with hadoop.
I need the book !!!
:D

My first attempt at graphing was in third grade. At Christmas, my teacher pulled out a big glass jar full of red and green M&M’s and announced a contest where whoever closest guessed the correct number of candy pieces inside the jar would win it. While my friends were all huddled around her desk counting with their fingers, I had out a piece of paper trying to draw the jar and the M&M’s inside. Once complete, I started counting my hand-drawn M&M’s and somehow came to a number. It was neither scientific or accurate, but guess what? I won!

I’m pretty sure my first graphs would have been in junior high, so they would have been on pencil and paper. Quite possibly graph paper–that was one of the school supplies we were always required to buy.

In the early 1950s, I made my first graph with a wooden ruler, plain white paper, and a pencil. I had to sketch out the parallel lines then the graph. It was a wonderful production, with tongue massaging lips as I went for straight-lined perfection.

Hard to say as I’m not sure that we didn’t do some kind of jelly bean (more than likely M&M) Graph back in elementary school. I’d say my first volitional graph would have been on Excel 95. It would likely have been terribly ugly, as all excel graphs from that era were. Que sera.

I probably made my first graph with a steady hand on a piece of paper. Later on I began to use a ruler, and years later, I was using Microsoft Paint and then Lotus or some sort offimatic suite. Then I discovered Excel’s 3D graphs and I feel in love with those. Finally I moved to SAS, Matlab and Gnuplot, and am planning to go for OpenGL and Processing :)

That must have been on a magnetic board. These boards allow you to scribble upon and easily erase your drawing by pulling a button from left to right. My first graph was a simple graph with time on the y-axes and the number of smarties on the x-axes. How many smarties will I have after one hour, how many after two hours ….

Me? Pencil and paper. But one of the most amazing things I saw as a kid was an exhibit at the science museum, somewhere in downtown LA. That had built a huge plexiglass rectangular box – thin, with a bunch of columns. They used air to shoot thousands of ping pong balls up to the top. The ping pong balls bounced around and fell into one of the columns. AND every time, amazingly to me, the ping pong balls formed a perfect bell shaped curve. I watched this forever!

I was going to order that book in the next few days, but hey, let’s give your contest a shot!
definitely pen & paper, in maths class.

but know this.
in OECD countries, 46.48% of 15-years-olds report that they are able to use a spreadsheet to plot a graph. This goes up to over 82% in the Netherlands.
unsuprisingly they get better school results. on a 200-800 scale where 500 is average, kids who know charts get + 12 points in reading, +14 in maths and +21 in science.http://pisa2009.acer.edu.au/force_download.php?file=oecd_files_2009%2F906430.CSV

Second Jeremy’s comment – that book is on my to-buy list already so this is for fun and also because I am a huge fan of the site!

Got to go with the pen-on-paper route (school) followed by Lotus and then MatLab (college/work). However, given the dexterity shown (by even my 2-year old) in navigating touch screen devices like the iPad, I am confident that the future of information visualization is going to be about interactive and multi-dimensional navigation of data.

Really? How can one be expected to remember such things? But my best guess is regular notebook paper with a pencil, probably in 5th or 6th grade pre-algebra. My wife loves to tell everyone about how her nerd husband forced her and our son to participate in creating a decision matrix with accompanying graph using markers on tag board when we were considering a move from SC to MO.

I figure my first graph (in non lay-parlance) was a bristol board chart of the weather for a full month, done in big fat colourful markers. As it was a week late, and I was using such pretty colours, my grade 5 teacher neglected to notice that I had not kept a journal of the weather (as I was to have done), but merely invented a mix of sun, rain, and cloud for every period that appeared on this chart. Until I got the A mark, I was traumatized by fear and guilt.

My first graph was a pencil, graph paper, lots of eraser droppings and a frown. Turns out that because a graph shows up a lot of details in a compact way, there are a lot of things to get right. Or wrong.

My first chart or visualisation was probably the same as everyone else’s – a visual time-based plot formed by my mother’s expanding belly in the sight of my father. The most enduring is probably the long, slightly warped white-painted stick at my grandfather’s house on which was measured and displayed the story of his grandchildren; our efforts, assisted by biology, to be as tall as possible each summer. Chest out, straining, all for a little mark. The very top mark? Mine.

Graph paper, pencil, ruler and compass. In fact. I still have an old drawing kit from my freshman year in college when I was an engineering major. I realized I could not draw by hand (a requirement back in those days) and switched to math as a major.

My first graph was black ink on engineering-ruled graph paper. But that was a mathematical function. The first statistical graph was with SPSS (1978), rendered in ASCII characters on, I think, some kind of DECWriter printer. The epic advance — it now feels like the Golden Age — was when I had a Mac SE/30 with an Apple LaserWriter, sending S code to a unix machine, getting back PostScript. Decades later, still doing much the same (S -> R, Perl -> Ruby), except that the Mac / Unix hardware sits on my lap.

pencil ruler and graph paper….
I was in love with graph paper, I could hardly believe the story you could tell using it with, gasp, data….
I wish I could find a reason to use it regularly…. it still gets me giddy.

I’m sure I graphed things before the first one I can recall. That graph was made with excel in about 1996. Sometime in my early teens and right around the time of the OJ Simpson trial. I found in a copy of the Cleveland BAR association newsletter a survey which asked basic questions about the trial and about the news coverage of it. It was my fortune then to have access to both a predominantly white school, where I went to school, as well as a predominantly black school, which was where I spent my off days and helped my grandmother (a guidance counselor). At the time I was in about 8th grade. About 400 students from two grades across two school responded. I had assistance from the schools themselves in getting the survey disseminated and collected.

Essentially the main graph was a bar graph with grouped bars, 1 per response per question per school. The survey was about 20 questions long and true or false. I also graphed the number of people who answered all true or false as a pie chart per school. Also people who answered in a contradictory manner. Also the number of people who put their names on the page after being instructed not to.

Turns out the predominantly black school thought OJ did it and the white kids didn’t. Weird.

Lined paper (it may have had the thicker lines that younger elementary school students tend to use), a pencil, and a ruler. Maybe colored pencils, too, but I think that was an “improvement” that came later…

Since my school life started before computers, or at least before computers where smaller than a room and cost more than the school, my first graph was on lined notebook paper with a pencil. I homeschooled my two boys and when we did graphs in science we used m&ms and other fun things that you could eat once the graph was finished or along the way. :-)

Pencil and door frame. Time Series graph of height. Apparently I, uh, decreasing the interval length, and introduced some irregularities in data recording technique, when i assumed the process of graphing. This makes the graph difficult to read for a while around 2 years.

Check this out: I wrote a GW-BASIC program on my DOS-based PC to draw a graph on the screen, which I then printed and drew a game map on. This resulted in an ‘Ok’ prompt in the upper-left corner of the graph. Here is the result:

The first graph *ever* was on a Tandy TRS-80, back in the mid 80’s. In grad school, I sung the wonders of Gri, an open-source graphics package designed by Dan Kelley at Dalhousie University, for oceanographers. Commands like “read columns” and “draw curve” were too simple to pass up!

My first graph was pencil and paper. I remember getting the TI-85 in High School and immediately found the limits of its capabilities. That Ti-85 was were I began programming. From there Excel-Qbasic-C++-VBA-SQL-R-SAS. Moving into a more dynamic flexible environment like open source would be great. Maybe in 2011 I will dedicate some time to doing this.

Probably in my first stats class in college (circa 1971) and probably with pencil and paper since I wasn’t an engineer and had ready access to graph paper; I was just a geeky math student at an engineering school (Mich Tech). I do remember using slide rules and my first calculator. Wow, I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I had a TI-83 back then, let alone a laptop!

In intro physics lab in college we had to plot our data against a sine curve. I was fairly new to spreadsheets and was using quattro pro. I graphed the data, but couldn’t figure out how to plot the sine curve. I looked for “Plot sine curve button.” I tried drawing it myself. Finally I called the professor. He told me how to fill the cells with function values and then graph them. It was so simple. My understanding of spreadsheets grew two sizes that day.

When I was in fourth grade, our teacher came up with a project to teach us about bar graphs.

She had our class graph our mother’s and father’s ages — I believe it was with construction paper on poster board.

Now, I happened to be the product of a second marriage — my father married my mother when he was in his 50s, and I was born when he was 55.

I was never self-conscious about my dad being significantly older than most other kids’ dads … until that day when our teacher posted the completed age graphs in the hallway outside our classroom, for all the school to see.

The graph for fathers showed a few hills and valleys — and then, smack dab in the middle, there was a skyscraper that shot up far above all the rest of the bars.

Used pencil and paper. Have been making graphs since I was 5 years old – our day-care provider taught us that when it goes up on the right-side, that is good. We tracked stuff like how many times per week we brushed our teeth and stuff like that on simple handmade line charts.

My first infograph (circa 1986) was made with colored paper and glue sticks to get an organic feel – this was before graphic programs did this sort of thing. Then I had it photographed and turned into a 35mm slide. It showed the overhead of various network protocols (TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, NetBIOS, Appletalk and the hardware chatter/latency between ethernet, token-ring and arcnet). The cool part was the graphics of the network types looked like the network topology (bus, ring and star). Alas, the slides were destroyed some years ago.

My first graph would have been drawn with one of those big red pencils, on that grey paper with chunks of wood in it and with a wooden ruler with one of those metal blades for tearing paper in straight lines. Ahh, memories of elementary school.

My first graph was in middle school – using a pencil and graph paper. My graphs were never very neat or well done, and were usually covered in eraser residue.
Now I use SAS, Excel or Powerpoint, and am very grateful that I don’t have to use my drawing skills (or lack thereof) to make a living.

Paper and pencil charts and graphs in a class in 5th and 6th grade. My first computer graph was using an Apple IIc in a basic computer class, 2nd semeter, taken right after we learned typing on Royal manual typewriters.

Engineering graph paper and pencil. My brother (8 years older) was at college and I LOVED that green tinted engineering graph paper. It was like getting a real Erlenmeyer Flask when you were 8 years old – you were playing with REAL science now.

TI-82, after which I promptly went out and purchased a TI-85 using lawn mowing money. Best investment ever, I use it almost daily and it’s gotten me through high school, college and two master’s degrees.

Back then I always thought the people who heaped up their sweets were simply hoarding them (away from me!). I’m still not very much convinced otherwise. As for overhead projectors, I simply adored them from afar (they were seldom) – but since I was once forced to actually do something on one, I also had to realize that from-afar adoration would be my wisest approach to them. It ended up very messy – thank god for the PC!

My very first graph? I probably made it with crayons and one of these connect-the-dots paintings, though my mummy (a teacher) later insisted that she abhorred them!

My first graph? Wow, that was so long ago I’m not sure. Probably a simple linear equation back in middle school algebra done with graph paper, straight-edge and pencil. Haven’t thought about y=mx + b, abcissa, ordinate, y-intercept, etc., in ages. Or maybe a freehand Venn diagram in pencil on plain paper.

Cheerios. I made 1×1, 2×2, 3×3 and 4×4 squares out of the Cheerios. I tried 5×5 but it was too much for a hungry 6 year old. I told my mom there was something important about how 2 by 2 make 4, 3 by 3 make 9, etc. I guess as a kid I was discovering squares and, if I’d thought about it more, square roots. While not a graph in the strictest sense it was still a fun exploration of patterns with numbers using an elementary material.

On the first day of college, they sat us down in front of the original IBM PC. We wrote a program to write dots to the screen corresponding to a certain mathematical function, x-y curve. I probably had done hand-written charts before that, but the programming aspect really got me interested in this field!

Paper and pencil, like everyone else – for the first one I had to draw my own grid. By my first summer job I had graduated to graph paper. Who remembers having to redraw a whole graph of 100s of measurements, because the 400th point was off the scale you’d decided on?

Blank sheet of paper, ruler, & a pencil. Later, in college, we borrowed Windows machines from the Business school so we could run Excel (only graphing software available). It was really frustrating to make decent measurements & calculations, then have to print preset axes and use asterisks for points!

marker and dining room wall – something like a histogram – I think there were two lines – 1 for all the toy cars I had vs all the cars my cousin had. My line was pretty long. It wasn’t pretty but I think I understood graphs from a very early age ;-)

My first graph was an attempt to figure out how batting average (on the back of my baseball card) compared to hits (same). I couldn’t figure out how to calculate the batting average from the information on the back of the card (I don’t think you can, but I was 8 at the time and haven’t revisited the question). Anyhow, I used a black magic marker and wide-ruled paper, which I would not recommend–I think I left some (cleanable) spots on the table below.

I was using VisiCalc on my Apple ][ and I made a set of basic program that I humbly called VisiStat. I coud not afford VisiPlot (at the time), so I included very basic-what was it? 192×128 blocky pixels-charts to “my” VisiStat.
After, I used custom development on PDP Unix with GKS (graphical kernel system) and NCAA graphic library to plot more sophisticated graphs from physics experiments. That was around 1983-1986.
Output was a 4 pen-HP plotter, where you had to change pen by the hand.

My mother was an elementary school teacher, and she would teach my brother and I “popcorn math” on the kitchen table. I think my first graph was a popcorn graph of the number of spoons/forks/knives in our silverware drawer, and it was delicious.

First graph probably involved notebook paper and pencil. Most serious graph almost certainly involved only Excel. Graphing tool I most look forward to using is some combination of Python & Sage & Blender.

As a young child, I would dump out all the M&Ms in the packet, group them in lines by color next to one another. (My first bar graph with color!) I started this around 4.

The funny part is how I used my graph. I would strategically eat them, so I could end with the least frequent color and also have a good distribution of color while snacking. So, I started with the most frequent (always light brown – yuck!) and typically ended with red or blue. I found this typical color distribution terribly disappointing as I “liked” the least frequent red ones best. I assure you that I tested this distribution as often as I could talk my parents into it.

I don’t remember my first graph. I do clearly remember a project for 6th grade, in which I made a map of Europe with all of Napoleon’s major battles drawn on it – my very first data visualization. My parents were hoping I was going to be into history. Little did they know I was just into maps.

I still remember my first deliberate attempt to draw a graph. It was for AP Biology in 9th grade and I was plotting the temperature of some mixture over time, showing the rate of heat dissipation.

I drew on thick graph paper – white with blue lines – and I used a wooden, number two pencil that left thick dark lines (I’d been hoping for thinner cleaner lines).

I was so convinced that the graph needed to be perfect in order to be correct that I erased and re-drew most of it a dozen times. To this day I remember re-drawing the zig-zag on the Y axis a dozen times, trying to remember how my teacher had drawn it in class.

By the time I was done the paper had a grey sheen of graphite and had taken on the texture of flannel. But the lines were straight, the points were *exactly* where they were supposed to be and I felt like I could frame the thing and hang it in my room.

These days I just dash out sloppy graphs on a white board or punch up nice ones in R or some other friendly graphing tool. Thinking about it makes me wonder how I’d do if I dragged out the colored pencils and a ruler and tried for a little hand made brilliance.

My first graph on graph paper with colored pencils turned out to be a cutest graph I’d ever drawn. I don’t remember what the assignment was, but I do remember the end result was the most geometrical representation of smokey the bear. I’m sure I received an F …for forest fires. I’m sure of it. :p

Back at elementary school I must have used a 1mm-squared orange-browned piece of paper, black and color pencils and ruler. I mean heavy use of the ruler — it was the time I was obsessed about straight lines! Instead my first real graphing was surely made with good old Excel, no plugins added.

At elementary school, I used graph paper, ruler, and triangle with pencil.
At university, first my instructor lectured to use tracing paper, graph paper and ruler with pen.
# I was in department of psychology belonging to literature department in1986.

But I was bored such procedure, then I went to computer center in campus and made tiny program in SAS, which was drawing graph to Tektronix 4014 terminal.

Graphic paper in combination with data from tables has been my first use of analytics in elementary schools.. Nowadays I use python, excel and starting to learn processing. Let’s see if i’m on time! :)

My undergrad research mentor had a very fancy looking mechanical drawing set with all sorts of shiny devices (http://bit.ly/gE9V0M) and super expensive marker pens. While I am glad not to be using that equipment for plotting genome-scale data, no graphical software package could ever substitute for the tactile satisfaction that stuff provides.

My first graph must’ve been in maths class at school. The earliest i can remember was on grid paper with pencil, when i was about 11 years old. Don’t forget to label the axes! My first dataviz for work purposes was probably using mrtg in a network performance monitoring project i knocked up about ten years ago in my first real IT job.

I remember putting stickers on a posterboard to track the volume of books our class read for Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) in third grade on what I would now call a histogram. I guess that was the beginning of my love affair with data.